This week in links - week 15, 2008
"Separate U.S. and U.K. surveys released this week found that search engines are failing workers.""A world without Enterprise RSS" by James Dellow:
"...keyword searches don't work for most employee searches and the search 'monster' is becoming a growing problem for businesses and organizations."
"In its report, Sinequa said many employees in the London study are struggling to find even the most basic information, and their travails are negatively impacting their productivity. Just 8% of the workers have a tool that permits them to search across their own company using key search terms, Sinequa said."
"Enterprise users are lacking some of the tools and features available through the Web 2.0 consumer RSS ecosystem. And Enterprise RSS users want their RSS "when and where they want it" too!"
"The problem is that without Enterprise RSS this is hard to achieve, as most basic enterprise approaches to RSS use a simple Web content publishing approach - i.e. RSS content is published like any other Web content but consumed through an existing application or a desktop reader. However, the RSS content has no idea if anyone has actually read it and if a user wants to consume RSS feeds on different devices or even from different reading applications on the same device, well... bad luck."
"Enterprise Twitter – or how to tap social networks for expertise without using email" by Ross Dawson:
"In organizational network analysis circles, an MIT study on how people find information is often cited. The research showed that in an organization, people were five times more likely to go to people than to databases to get answers to their questions. So knowledge workers’ productivity is strongly related to their social networks, in terms of who they know who can help them, and whether there is sufficient trust and reciprocal value in the relationship that they get a response."
"Effective professionals are already tapping their external networks using Twitter and other tools to do their work better. They should also be able to use the same tools inside the organization."
"Building relevant social ties based on trust and mutual understanding that enable focused, efficient questions and knowledge sharing will always be far higher value than broadcast mechansims. However there is definitely a role for light-touch queries inside organizations, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of that in the coming year or two. "
"Tips for Social Computing in the Enterprise" by Chris Howard, vice president and director of the Executive Advisory Program at the Burton Group:
"People form communities based on shared interests. Once the community is in place, it becomes a greenhouse for the development of ideas and the distribution of information, attracting all those who wish to participate."
"Chris Zook recommends searching for "undeveloped adjacencies," or unexploited capabilities in the organization that can be developed into new, repeatable processes. Successful corporate innovation capitalizes on existing assets and ideas combined in new ways. Use of social computing creates a new stage for innovation, where ideas are more easily exposed and patterns spotted. As communities work out the kinks of new ideas in public forums, innovative thinking coalesces and ownership/leadership emerges."
"The collective intelligence of the community leads to answers more quickly. As more questions are answered, repeatability increases. As new workers enter the company, there is a baseline of knowledge to get them ramped up more effectively. Much of that knowledge is available as content within the social computing infrastructure."